Blog

Jake Parrick Month 5 | An Author’s Journey to Publication

Sorry that it has been a while since I posted on this series, many of you know me. My name is Jake Parrick and I’m the author of ‘Atlantis Rising’. Things have been incredibly busy and it looks like its only going to get busier.

I’ve been looking for a way to raise funds, I need $75,000 to publish ‘Atlantis Rising’ the way that I want to. Meaning that I want my book to be successful and for it to be successful it needs a marketing budget, among other things. Even getting it edited is expensive, close to $7,000. I cringe when I think about it.

I decided to run a Kickstarter. Before I do that though, I have to get every loose end on my website and SEO tied together and build something of a following. If you’ve read my earlier blog posts about marketing and publishing, then you may have read my article on Kickstarter. I need to be able to guaranty that I can hit certain timed mile stones in the Campaign so that Kickstarter will see the project as being successful and begin to promote it.

So that is where I am now. I have figured that I need $5,700 to be able to guaranty those milestones on Kickstarter. How to raise 5 grand though?

Let me tell you, I was very hesitant about doing this for a few a reasons. The first being that when my Kickstarter goes live, every sale in the first 48 hours is crucial. I need to sell 250 pre-sale paperback copies to raise the 5K and those sales are going to come from the people that are the backbone of who I was counting on during the Kickstarter.

This means that the money raised from the pre-sale, to be used to build the foundation of the Kickstarter, has higher stakes now than if I had been able to raise the 5K through different means.

Lets talk about the budget leading up to the Kickstarter. I have quite a few friends who are indie authors and they all ask what the 5 grand will get spent on. First, I’ll be working with a firm called Quicksprout. They are going to tie up the loose ends on my website as well as fine tune the SEO. Its the stuff that I can’t do myself. I say can’t, but the truth is that I simply don’t have the time to learn it. I plan on watching them work so that if I need to do it again I can. They will also be getting me my manual backlinks, which is one aspect of this process that I’ve had little success in.

The rest of the money will pay for some marketing program subscriptions that I’ll need, like: Sumome, and others. It will fund my ads on Facebook and Pinterest and will also be used to build my email list. There is a firm called Leadserve that I plan on working with. They embed ads behind gated websites with email opt-in forms. By the time the Kickstarter roles around I should hopefully have close 10,000 emails.

Anyways, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m going to try and finish up my Western Civ article series and then begin a new one dealing with ancient conspiracies and the Nephilim.

Related

When Jake isn’t writing about Fallen Angels, Lizard People, or bad-ass Atlantean Knights wearing powered assault armor and killing the before mentioned Fallen Angels and Lizard People; he can usually be found in his secret bunker carefully calibrating the surface-to-air missile defense system…
Just Kidding.
I live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, on an island in the Puget Sound. When we want to leave the island we go down to the beach, and so long as our offering is sufficient, an Orca will give us a ride to the mainland.
My blog is devoted to a few things: history, mythology, and my book.